Sunday, February 25, 2018

Why We Need the Second Amendment More than Ever

While executives at Delta, United, Avis, etc. are virtue signaling as loudly as they can to assure us they want nothing to do with those supposed gun nuts in the National Rifle Association and are ending discounts (such as they were) for members of that organization, a real-world observation of what went on in the Parkland tragedy, not to mention other key contemporary events, might yield a radically different conclusion.

To wit: The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has much to recommend it. Indeed, we may need it more than ever.

Let's start with Parkland. It's evident now, no matter what you think of current gun laws, that a myriad of governmental bureaucracies and police departments -- from school authorities to social workers to the FBI to the Broward County Sheriff's Office -- screwed up on a level that borders on the incomprehensible. Blinded by a mutually reinforcing cocktail of political correctness and organizational stupidity and ineptitude, they were clueless about the near constant acting out of Nikolas Cruz.

He could have flown across the country in a hot air ballon, dropping buckets of blood and guts and trailing a banner reading "I'm Gonna Shoot Up a School," and these clowns wouldn't have done anything. When Cruz actually started shooting, they behaved like the most execrable cowards, the police hiding behind cars while students and teachers were dying. That their boss, Sheriff Scott Israel, still has his job is the most incomprehensible development of all.

Would anybody in his right mind trust these people with his own security, let alone those of his children?

Is it any surprise that when President Trump asked his CPAC audience Friday which was more important to them -- the Second Amendment or tax reform -- they chose the right to bear arms?

The ultimate reason that that amendment came to be was something just as crucial (perhaps more, if that's possible) as personal or family protection -- and I bet almost everyone in that CPAC crowd knew it.

It was for the citizenry to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.

But isn't that from a different era, you might ask, when people were running around with muskets? Hardly. In 1938, Hitler forbid all Germany's Jews from having guns. We know where he went from there. Stalin and Mao, the two greatest mass murderers of history, controlled the weaponry in their societies. "Power," Mao famously wrote in the Little Red Book, "comes from the barrel of a gun."

Ironically, it is some of the same people, most specifically the FBI in this case, who allowed the carnage in Parkland that are threatening our democratic republic on a political level. That organization, we have learned, essentially acted in cahoots with one of our political parties to suborn a court to enable the spying on another of our political parties and later on our president. This weekend we have confirmation that that took place because the memo finally released by the Democratic wing of the House Intelligence Committee shows no evidence that the FISA court was informed that the Steele Dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign. All that is there are the most tepid of euphemisms.

This is, of course, the stuff of incipient totalitarianism. This is why James Madison and the other Founders proposed we adapt the Second Amendment from British Common Law. They saw into a future beyond muskets and AR-15s and Glocks and even drones, lasers and whatever else people will use on each other.

Yes, it's complicated. And, yes, there are some points to be made on the side of gun control. I'm one of those who thinks the age of purchase should be raised to twenty-one, in part because we live in era when our children are maturing so slowly. Our college campuses are clear evidence of that. I'd also be happy with longer waiting periods. But the right to bear arms is sacrosanct....